"My experience as a basketball captain. " - General CommonApp Prompt

How is this so far? :)

Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences.

Basketball has been a high school experience that along with keeping me in shape, has taught me how to face failure, lead a pessimistic team to a hard-earned victory and to persevere - even without immediate commendation.

Captaining my school's basketball team taught me many things besides learning how to shoot layups. At a poorly funded international school, our team was something of a joke to the student body. Through lost matches, I had to learn to be a strong leader, while also dealing with judgment and subtle criticism.

Learning to cajole teammates into putting in extra effort and time during practice along with working hard to acquire more skill in my techniques reciprocated more than a long-awaited win and a unified team. It helped me realize the significance of understanding how to give others an incentive to work while also attempting a solution for pressing issues.

Good so far, but it seems to be an incomplete presentation. Even with the word limitation on this statement, you should still manage to come up with a proper introduction, body, and concluding statement. All within a number of sentences or within 3 paragraphs, whichever fits the word maximum requirement. Your second paragraph sounds almost exactly like your first paragraph, with a few changes here and there. Try to present a new piece of information that highlights what you learned or what you did as the b-ball captain. There must be some other interesting tidbits you can share that helps to lighten the mood of the statement while highlighting your skills as a team leader. Your last paragraph sounds like it needs a closing sentence at the very least. It sounds like there are still more statements to come but then you forgot to include it. Close that paragraph in order to create a tight statement response.

Your essay is good and also shows that you deeply care about your role as a leader (valuable for your application!). On the other hand, explain WHY it is important to you, HOW you contributed to your team. Exemplify, provide anedcots, vivid experiences of your role as a leader that show WHY you are passionated about it.

You perfectly showed how it contributed to your personal development. Just work on these points, you can do it!

The essay displays how much of a leader you are but as @holt said, it's too short. A way to lengthen the essay would be to describe some obstacles and how you conquered them, how you manage your time, or even talk about what motivates you while still displaying how much of a great leader you are.

@roomonfire
I think ts good. I believe that you need to tell them that why you joined the team, and what importance it has for you? Other than that, I believe that when you say something like leadership skill you need to define what leadership skills? What does it mean to you? I think it will allow your essay to become more specific and tight. Other than that, I think it was written in a haste and needs to be presented properly to the reader. I hope it helps.

Thank you all for your feedback! It's much appreciated :)

you did a good job to describe your extracurricular activities very well, but if you pay more attention to what this brings to you or how does it help of your personality more, i believe you will get a higher score.